Ernst August Wagner

Life & Legacy

Ernst August Wagner (22 September 1874 – 27 April 1938) was a German teacher and mass murderer. On 4 September 1913, Wagner fatally stabbed his wife and four children in Degerloch. He subsequently travelled to Mühlhausen an der Enz where he fatally shot nine people and wounded eleven others, before he was beaten unconscious by intervening villagers and left for dead.
Wagner cited his fear of being exposed as a zoophiliac as the primary motive. Despite widespread public calls for the death penalty, a team of psychiatrists, including Robert Gaupp, successfully argued that Wagner was not guilty by reason of insanity, the first such instance in Württemberg. He was brought to an asylum in Winnenden, where Wagner wrote several plays and dramas, none of which were ever performed. He died there of tuberculosis in 1938.
The case was of immediate interest due to Wagner's troubled personal life, marked by mental illness and familial issues, which was seen as having heavily contributed to the murders. Wagner's psychological profiling through Gaupp during his 25-year confinement at the asylum became one of his most prominent clinical patient studies. Wagner's case gained renewed attention in the 1990s within German academic spaces as an early example of a mass shooting and perceptions of societal collapse in the late German Empire.